It is unfortunate that you felt the need to temporary remove the tool and to then further escalate the situation by mothballing it; but maybe offer Elite Authors a substitue for the time being? unless the issue was actually entirely monetary related of course. The main concern is that this new pricing structure will not be available for over a year as milestones do not seem to be kept in regard to the themeforest (unforeseen issues ect).

As Mike Mcalister said earlier there has been a giant underlaying break down in communication over the last year and gargantuan delays in development progression; for instance it was advertised that the tool would be down for a short time and would then come back as soon as possible. There was no talk of issues (in the public domain) with the tool or any foresight indicating it may have to be removed permanently from what I have witnessed at least.

Icons and forum titles are lovely but they do not equate to a possible; thousands of dollars a month which some authors are currently earning from that extra $5. Hopefully authors did not forecast their income based on now to be false figures leading them to invest in things that they may deem poor ventures now (unless the items will retain their higher price until the new pricing structures).

There are always massive hurdles to be overcome and we all love the themeforest but isn’t it time to make it better instead of dithering?

Some authors use functions for certain things, in some cases authors might have the HTML in the theme panel as a default setting so you edit it there, but I think most the time authors (I do this) organize their code into various folders so its actually easier for the buyer and then use include/require statements to pull the code in.

Example:

A wordpress theme might use the same loop on archive.php, blog-template.php, author.php and index.php, search.php. So instead of adding the code to all these files you create a new file called loop-entry.php and then in the other files you pull this code using something like:

<?php get_template_part( 'loop' , 'entry'); ?>

This way, there is 1 file with all the php/html required for that loop. So now you can edit 1 file and see the change across the whole site instead of having to edit every single theme file.

It’s the same idea as how WordPress has a header.php, sidebar.php, footer.php files – because they are used in multiple locations.

Another Example is for post formats authors might have a folder called “post-formats” and then a file for each post format (image.php, quote.php, gallery.php…etc). This makes it a whole lot easier to work with the theme as instead of having to go through 1 giant file with several if statements, you can easily edit the post formats individually.

I am not sure what themes you have bought. But at least when I make a theme I’m always thinking of how I can structure files so they are easier to edit and more dynamic. No one wants to buy a theme in which they have to edit 100 files just to change 1 thing. And I think this is the same logic a lot of other authors use.

You mention you “are not a developer”, yet you are buying and customizing themes. In which case you pretty much are. If you are always doing this, maybe you need to expand a bit more on your skills instead of spending so much time trying to guess where files are, if you can understand the PHP logic it will be much easier for you to know how it all works